Choosing the We-School for Yuvaan

Yuvaan had barely crossed 13-months when I enrolled him in a sports class. A few reasons: he has unlimited energy, has shown no fear of heights, or new people, or animals; like me he is most happy outdoors, and the clinching indicator was when, the day after his 1st birthday he had successfully kicked his first football. Only for two seconds. But we were at a dinner party in Singapore and an older kid had shown him how to do it and he copied him so well. I thought, Yuvaan is a born footballer. He is little Rafael reincarnated (my cat who also loved to play football). Additionally, he was so eager and showing so much skill that just running around parks and playing games at home with me was not pushing his boundaries enough. So, I hunted down sports classes for toddlers.

Actually, I was initially hunting music classes for toddlers since he was methodically hammering all surfaces he could reach or touch at that point. I thought maybe he is ready to play the tabla. But the music schools refused to enrol him till he is at least 6. So, in our hunt for music schools in Koregaon Park, we strolled down to the Music Box. In a conversation, they directed me to sporty beans and we began his sports class. It was lots of fun. So vibrant and well located. lots of children playing in various age groups and though Yuvaan was 8 months younger than the youngest child enrolled there, he ran the maximum—mostly disrupting the games the other groups were trying to play.   

My mom was so delighted with the videos of him running wild that she came down to attend the class with him. Three months passed and we couldn’t tell if he had learnt something. But is that even a goal? Shouldn’t it be just great that he’s outdoors, poised to learn, surrounded by laughter and friends and willing to try new things? We thought we were feeding him and exhausting him but he was still sleeping @ 1 AM and ready to watch nursery rhyme videos all night. Okay party boy slow down—you are just inching towards 18 months, not years, just months. So I put on my mommy reflection hat. Simply because every time we see Yuvaan doing something unusual we have come to realize that it is not his preference or personality flaw.

It is an optimal parenting gap or a gap in our parenting abilities:

·        Am I being too relaxed?

·        Is my husband being too controlling?

·        Are the grandparents constantly pointing out negative qualities in this tiny infant?

And then of course, the question of the decade: can Yuvaan sense he is surrounded by dummies? is that why he gets so frustrated?

The more I reflect, I realize that my only job as his parent is to get out of his way. Yuvaan’s birth has been a sort of rebirth or reawakening for me. When you are holding and nurturing a baby so up-close and personal, it makes you realize that all of us are born ‘perfect for our destiny’ and it’s the adults around us that are *uckign us up. We are born adequate—with full knowledge of our past lives and all the tools to close our karmic deficit. We know who we are and where we want to end up—even if we cannot express it. We are ready for the journey that will take us there. It is humbling, similar to how it was when I became a pet parent to Rumble and Rafael.

Yet identity crises, existential experiments and all the nut-job-iness in the world that we encounter and often become—are rooted in mis-parenting (parenting without empathy). So I had decided—I am going to get out of his way and let him be and grow into his own person. I am his mommy for the basic few things he cannot do on his own. The rest, he manages just fine. And in order to allow him a next-level, next-gen environ to grow and learn—we decided he was ready for preschool. I began my research online. It seemed that there were many fun options between Koregaon Park and Kalyani Nagar. I walked across the road into Strong Roots. It was disorganized, filthy and the centre in-charge couldn’t separate herself from her phone. I scratched it off my list.

As we walked, we realized that the internet listings were not all updated. We managed to find Primrose. Lovely premises, well-spoken, smiling staff. The principal said to come back when Yuvaan turns 2. On our way back home, we entered Noah’s Ark. Small but lively. Misbah the owner-manager was responsive and gave us a great deal. Since it was March and the last month before closing—she enrolled him for 2 hours @ Rs. 1000 for March. I thought what a great experiment for us. I used to drop him off sometimes in the stroller and sometimes we would sing and walk hand–in-hand. The school only called me on one day when he was very sleepy and cranky. The rest of the time he would eat, nap, play and poop and was never ready to come home when I went to fetch him.

Our pre-school experiment was so positive that I decided post-summer to explore all possible options for a year-long enrolment. Summer came and we travelled and swam, and that one month with him made me realize that I was wasting his time. He needed to be patiently allowed to do new things—things that were different from what he was learning and doing at home already. He needed a group of kids his age to call his own. For me, I needed to start feeling like my normal self and move from quantity to quality time with Yuvaan. We were already a natural mommy-toddler sing-song n dance your pants off team. We loved to roll on the grass together. Around me he was his maddest self and I did not want to interrupt that with formal education. But we both seemed to love a few hours away from each other each day.

I actively started calling and mailing all the various preschools and visited 15+ over a span of 3 months. My checklist for schools grew firmer with each new visit and at the end this is what mattered to us:

·        Close proximity from home so that none of us waste time in traffic, especially with monsoon-clogged roads.

·        Nice outdoor set up with quality slides, swings and other toys.

·        Grassy over muddy entrances with lots of sunlight and ventilation.

·        Did a sales person or the head of the learning centre greet and meet me? This started becoming a huge differentiator as our visits progressed.

·        Was there real curriculum or just low activity day care.

·        The attitude of the staff as they played with Yuvaan (we took him along on every visit so he could instinctively indicate where he was happiest, which it turns out was anywhere there was a slide.)

·        Limited/no use of air-conditioning as in the monsoon the kids spread viral faster to each other when breathing trapped air.

·        Reasonable fee for a toddler under 3.

·        Mid-size school population (75-100 kids across all primary batches)

·        Good teacher to staff to student ratio in each class.

·        Does the school offer sports for toddlers? Most did not.

My observations were that all the school reps—principals, admissions head, sales rep etc.—in the majority of Pune primary schools spoke English with a vernacular twang. So this stopped being a differentiator for me. I looked at the quality of the conversation instead.

And so we visited and then re-visited and selected Little Millennium KN as our We-School of choice. Though it was not recommended to us by any friend, we liked what we saw: a good facility with fabulous sunlight and a great outdoors section. No air-conditioning in pre-nursery classrooms. A good location except crossing that painful Kalyani Nagar bridge signal. We found Pranoti Bhalerao to be constantly available, eager, mature, and responsible. We found the price reasonable. We liked their inclusion of a football coach once a week, and that it was 75-strong on any given day.

Choose the school for you and your child. Do not go by 3rd party ratings, fancy terminology thrown at you (Playway, Montessori, 360 learning, or Gardner’s theory), or air-conditioned interiors.

Feel the vibe and decide.

Feel the ‘we belong’ so that your choice of pre-school feels like a we-school.

That’s what we did.